Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 118: SEGA's arcade history, 1988-1990

Episode Date: October 2, 2017

It's another dive into the classic arcade works of SEGA as Ben, Benj, and Jeremy visit the years 1988, 89, and 90 and all kinds of great and interesting games like Altered Beast, Gain Ground, Galaxy Force, and more!

This weekend Retronauts, I scream, you scream, we all scream, the Sega scream. SIGA! SIGA! SIGA! That's more like it. That's pretty good. You could be a 1990s advertisement on television. I was.

Were you the exploding fat guy in the Yoshi's Island commercial? Yes. I knew you looked familiar. I knew I knew I knew you from somewhere. I thought no one would ever recognize me in that. You slimmed down so much. I guess exploding does that to a guy. Hi, everyone.

Welcome to another episode of Retronauts ease, east, east, dee, and I am Jeremy Parrish. Once again, as always. And with me this week, the usual motel. Rabble. Ben Jettwitch. And... Ben Elgin. Don't get them mixed up.

Their name sounds similar, but they're not. We're very different people. Ben E and Benjee. Nothing at all like. And this week, we are once again going back into the arcade history of none other than service games. That's right.

Sega. We've tackled the early, early days of Sega in the arcade from like 1970-something to 1985. And then last time, it was way back, way back to the days of oscilloscopes and and electromechanical devices and pinny arcades and carnival markers. Compasseters the size of your fist. That's right.

And last time, we talked about Sega, we talked about the golden years of 1986 and 1987. This time we're heading on to, I guess, the Silver Age of 1988 through 1990. And this wasn't a year, a set of years, quite. as like full of radical innovations as 86, 87, but, you know, there's still some really great games here, and we felt that they deserved being highlighted. And after this episode, we'll do one more look at Sega, probably through the 90s, where the games they made were more diverse, but not necessarily quite as like, hey, this is, you know, the shape of video games to come. And there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah, a lot of this couple of years feels like a stage

of refinement. So there's a lot of things that are either sometimes direct sequels and sometimes just inspired by the things we've talked about in the last couple episodes, but only more so. Right. And sometimes it's technical refinement. You know, you had the System 16 board, and then that sort of evolved into new system boards. And we'll be talking about those, one of those, right away, which is kind of an amazing piece of kit. And yeah, we'll talk about that. Right from your grave. I don't know. So any, any, any, should we do any, like, recapping of what we've, what's come before before we dive into 1988?

Any, any thoughts that stick out in your mind for those who need a refresher, like previously on Retronauts? I feel like we'll end up mentioning a lot of it as we talk about these games. Well, there's a few games that we're going to talk about that I've talked about before, probably two or three times on Retronauts already. Like, Hey, Yanko Alien and Deadly Tower. Altered beast and golden axe. Yeah. Yeah, you've mentioned them. Well, we talked about Golden X or Altered Beast last time.

Yeah, in the arcade episode. I talked about Golden X. A little bit. Not too much, though. We haven't really gone into depth on that one. But Altered Beast, yeah. We weren't talking about it in the context of Sega, but just in the context of arcades.

So that was actually, that was just a couple of weeks ago. So maybe we don't need to go over long on Altered Beast. Yeah. Because it's fresh. Just go back and listen to the Arcade Memories episode from a few weeks back. It's a really good one. You'll enjoy it. Okay, go listen.

And we're back. Okay, so it's on to the year 1988, which is where Sega began to head into the 90s. I don't know. It's just, it's good stuff happening. It's cool. So I guess I'm looking over the list of games here. Galaxy Forest Altered Beast, Tetris, Power Drift, Gain, Ground. Okay, there's one.

really vastly wildly, differently innovative game in here. And then everything else is like, you know, evolutionary. I have an idea. Why don't we try to set the stage of what was going on in 1988 in gaming? Do it. Well, the NES reign supreme in the home

and arcades were on the wane in America anyway, probably not in Japan. Okay, I'll stop the music. Yeah, so arcades, go ahead. Sorry. Yeah, I was just thinking, you know, what does it mean, you know, just each game held individually doesn't mean that much unless it's understood in its context, I think. I agree.

Because, you know, otherwise you'd be comparing Altered Bees to something made this year or something. It doesn't make any sense. That would be nonsense. Yeah, so I think I was just looking over this list in general. And what struck me about these games at the time when I was seven, eight years old, was that I was used to NES games at home. And when I went to an arcade, these games really blew me away with their graphics and complexity. So that was sort of my frame of reference at the time and probably was for most American kids.

Yeah, and I think that's going on with a lot of these games where you're, like you said, you're in an era where the arcades are sort of a little bit on the way. Lots of people have home systems now. So the things that are coming out are really trying to blow you away in the first few seconds with like, look how cool this is. You can't possibly get this at home. Stay here and play it. Put your quarters in. Yeah, I'm thinking back to the games that I played at like Putt Putt or Tilt or whatever in 1988 or 1989, 90, because I was going to the arcades a lot back then.

And the games that stuck out to me, definitely the Sega games that I actually saw in person, which surprisingly weren't that many. They tended not to show up that often where I live versus four. whatever reason. But they always stood out because they were always just like cutting edge visuals, you know, afterburner and outrun and so forth. It was just like, wow, how is this possible? But, you know, the games that I was playing, a lot of them came from Capcom. You had, you know, stuff like Strider. You had a Ninja Guidon that was Tecmo. Beat them ups were really getting really common around this time, 1990 or so. So like the Ninja Turtles beat them up and the Simpsons. I guess that was 91.

But just kind of this area. When did X-Men come out? 90? I think that was 90, yeah. So Konami was really kind of big into this. But at the same time, there were still a lot of holdovers from sort of, like, you know, games that had a more conservative visual style, stuff like Rampart or APB, that, you know, they didn't look that amazing, but they had cool gameplay ideas. And then you had games that were just like, I can't believe I'm looking at this, like Ninja Warriors, which had three screens across. That just came out on PlayStation 4.

Yeah, I heard about that. And they actually have, I don't think you can actually play it on three monitors, but they have, you know, because televisions are widescreen now, they have like true pixel resolution where you can play with two. It's like 768 pixels across by 224 tall. It's crazy. That's cool. Yep. So, so, yeah, this was sort of the context into which these games were born. And in every case, they either pushed the boundaries in terms of visuals or else they pushed in terms of like game concepts. So in 1988 you have Galaxy Force 1 and 2 and Altered Beast and Power Drift, which were just like visually stunning, amazing looking games, very fast-paced, very graphically impressive. And then you have Game Ground, which looks pretty bad, but it's such a cool idea. It's so unique, and it's really surprising that they would release a game like that in arcades because it feels more like... Like a strategy game.

Yeah, almost like a strategy game, almost like a PC game from the early 80s. I could see this being some sort of lost, like, PCX1, you know, NNAC Sharp X1 or whatever game from like 1984 that was super influential, but no one ever played, you know, kind of like, Hey, Yonki, William. It almost feels like a precursor to Warcraft in a way, but... It does, yeah. We'll get into that. But, yeah, there's definitely, like, you definitely see the gears spinning here.

Sega's either advancing the state of the art in terms of technology or advancing the state of the art in terms of artistry and, like, creativity. So even though these may not be the games that are held precious to everyone's hearts, like Outrunner or Afterburner, they're still really great games and still, you know, really did a great job of, I guess, giving Sega that kind of place as top of the arcades. Like, these are the arcade gods. No wonder they had the cool Sega Genesis because they were making those awesome arcade games and now they can give us that home experience. Yeah, and this is around the time the

Genesis came out, right? Wasn't the Genesis? It launched in October 1988 in Japan. In Japan. Mega Drive and 89 in US, right? Yep. Yep. So yeah, they were definitely thinking along those lines. They were thinking like, wow, we're kind of awesome. We should do something about this. And following up on the sort of unsuccessful master system with a much more important. impressive and better marketed and better supported system. And it rightfully painted them a place as a major force in home gaming, too. So this was, yeah, this was, I guess, you know, like 86, 87 was Sega's arcade glory days. And this is the beginning of the home console glory days.

And so now I think you almost see the arcades is like where they're sort of innovating and coming up with fresh ideas. And then Genesis is more like where they're refining it and coming up with, you know, expanding on those ideas and giving you experiences you can't have in arcades like Fantasy Star 2. You couldn't do that in Arcade, but you could do it on a home console. And you see the same sort of mindset like state-of-the-art advancements happening on both fronts for Sega. So, yeah, it's a great time. So, without further ado,

1988 will begin with Galaxy Force 1 and 2, which is kind of a lie. It's actually the same game. Yeah. And I had a hard time. I was doing research for this episode, and I was trying to find any footage whatsoever of the arcade version. of Galaxy Force, and it doesn't exist. As far as I can, I was, I looked like, you know, 10 pages deep in YouTube.

I subtracted the number two, the Roman numeral two, the Genesis, and I just could not find Galaxy Force One arcade footage. But it's okay because our Galaxy Force 2 is the same game, but like just made better. A little expansion kit, basically. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, you know, like Street Fighter 2 dash or whatever. Yeah. Just the same thing.

but fancier. But yeah, I really like this one. I think, you know, so it's, obviously, this is another super scalar game building on things like Space Harrier and Afterburner. I actually enjoy playing this one more. I think it's a more interesting game. It feels more refined. Space Harrier and Afterburner are very hectic and they're very visually impressive.

But when you actually sit down to play them, they're not really that fair. Like, the design is really like that classic arcade mentality where it's just like, oh, thanks for the quarter, now you're dead. Yeah. Can I have another quarter, please? Afterburners particularly just move so fast that it's hard to bring skill into play on it. Whereas Galaxy Force, the visuals are even more amped up in a lot of ways. There's so much going on on the screen, but the speed is dialed back,

so you actually have a chance to react to what's going on. And I feel like with this one, they started to think more about 3D space as opposed to just like giving you the impression of moving, you know, from a third-person perspective into the screen. They started to think about, like, what's the environment around you? Afterburner takes place, you know, above a plane of clouds. Like, there's clouds below you, and that's pretty much it. Space Harrier, you take place, it takes place over the surface of planet, and there's objects on the surface that come at you. But Galaxy Force, it's, you know, like you go into outer space and you go through all kinds of weird, not weird, but very diverse

outer space sci-fi settings. So caverns and corridors. Yeah, got corridors and tunnels. Weird like wormholes. Like big structures out in space. And a lot of ways, you know, I wonder if some of the Star Fox people were thinking of some of these stages because there are some of the stages that really remind me of some of the, you know, structures floating through space that you get in Star Fox.

Yeah. And I look at this and I kind of see it as the midpoint between Outrun and Panzer Dragoon. And I don't know why this game gives me such a Panzer Dragoon vibe. because Panzer Dragoon is so much slower than this. And it's really about like the locking on to enemies and kind of, you know, like very limited sort of slow-paced on-rail shooter. But there's something about, I don't know, like when I play this game, I get that vibe. Especially like the jungle planet and stuff.

Yeah, like, and actually, I guess maybe it's like, you know, you see the caverns full of magma and stuff. And like that makes me think of Crimson Dragon, which has some stages like that, which, you know, it's not a Panzer Dragoon. game, but it's a Panzer Dragoon game. All these Sega games have their own feel to them. It's probably their art style, their palette choice or something. I don't know.

I mean, Panzer Dragoon looks very different than Galaxy Force. Galaxy Force has like a very vivid color palette. Panzer Dragoon is more muted and kind of... I've just played the Saturn version of Panzer Dragon. Was it an arcade game, too? No. No, okay. It was a...

Saturn. They had pretty much shifted to home consoles by that point. okay well we haven't gotten to that yet no um yeah i don't know galaxy fours looks intense to me i've never played it but i saw a picture of a giant cabinet you could sit in with hydrolex and stuff sort of like we've talked about the afterburner one i've seen in the arcade when i was a kid and something kind of like that yeah similarly it had it had all different configuration so you could get a stand-up cab of it you could get like a very basic sit-down cab of it but then it went all the way up to this, you know, rotating cockpit thing that cost a ridiculous amount of money per play,

but was really cool. Yeah, how much do you think it costs like $50,000? Tens of $1,000. I can't imagine how long it would have taken to recoup the cost on that thing. Yeah. But, of course, you probably didn't see, like, independent arcade operators by those. Those were probably made for Sega arcades. Like, those were, those were kind of the lost leaders.

Well, or a big chain arcade. Oh, I don't have one. But, I mean, you know, in Tokyo, Sega has its own arcades. So, like, that's something they made for their installation because, wow, like, you can get this ultimate gaming experience at the Sega arcade. Why would you go to Taito Station? I remember the one, the afterburner one I saw was, I think it was $5 to play. So they were trying to recoup their costs. That was in the late 80s.

Man, that's a dickless amount of money. And people were lined up to play it, you know, because it would move you around. I thought a dollar for Dragonslayer was a lot. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think I ever paid more than a dollar or something when I was that age. I didn't, I don't know. Because even that was kind of ridiculous.

I feel like I did one of those after burner games, but there's one that was so intense you could almost go upside down or something. It was crazy strap in. I think those are the R360 machines, right? Yeah, the R360 would spin both horizontally and vertically. They were ridiculous. And then every half hour, they'd have the janitor

coming and clean up a vomit. Yeah. $5 and you can throw up. It's great for the bulimics. I have to have definitely played more Galaxie. Fox on MAME than on an actual arcade machine, which definitely has its drawbacks on this game, because the control for flying is really touchy, like just a little bit. We'll take center direction.

And when you're in the outer space stages, it's kind of okay. And when you're in a tight little cavern, you'll really wish you had a flight stick. I mean, if you have a flight stick hooked up to your computer, then that's probably better. As with many of these Sega arcade games we've discussed, the way to play it is actually 3DS, because this is another one that M2, Galaxy Force 2 specifically. I don't think it has the Galaxy 1 ROM in it, but this is another one that they put on 3DS as part of their 3D ages. It's like $8 normally, and you can get it on sale all the time.

I can't remember if this one's on the retail release. I don't actually, it might be. I'd have to check. I should have looked at that before. There was a collection release, right? Right, but the collection was a lot of games that hadn't been released already. So it was kind of an essential purchase for series collectors. but yeah it has you know analog control and it has um motion control oh does it and it has like

the simulated screen rotation so if you're controlling with gyro controls then it's it's going to rotate it's like this the super hang-on simulation they did check that out yeah they put so much love into those games i mean yes it's it's an arcade game on a handheld system for eight dollars which I like the value proposition on that. It might be a hard sell for some people, but the amount of care that they put into these is so intense. Like, it's just such a great work of preservation. The accuracy is incredibly high.

They look, they sound perfect. Yeah, so. Yeah, they're impressive. It's better than a dollar per credit. Yeah, or $5 to play. Or $5 a credit. Yeah. So I want to talk briefly about the Sega Y board that they ran this on.

This was like, why? This was the, not the culmination of their technology, but, man, like, reading about the details on this, there's a very detailed breakdown on one of the Sega arcade sites. And it's basically, like, three double-powered Sega Genesis is strapped together. Yeah, 360 and 400 boards. Yeah, like, they have color depth of, like, 16 million colors.

It's, they have, like, four different scrolling planes. Uh, it's just, it's, like, crazy what they did with this arcade board. Pretty much the ultimate in pixel manipulation. Yeah, 312 megahertz, 68,000 processors. That's basically like

three Amigas or three Macintoshes of the era. Yeah, yeah. Like, that's not cheap. That's very, that's a, that's a pricey bit of kit. And the Genesis was a much, much slower, single 68,000

or 68,000, yes. X, yeah, and Yeah, it was probably 8 megahertz, right, the Genesis? It was, yeah, like 7, 7.9, something. And so, yeah, so this is like 50% more powerful, 50% faster clock cycle per processor, but there's three of them. But it is pretty easy to see why they chose the 68,000

for the Sega Genesis, because that's what they were using the arcade. So it made the conversion process very sort of straightforward. Not that you could actually experience the Galaxy Force arcade game authentically on Sega Genesis. It was a damn fine console, but, I mean, already, like, the home hardware just can't begin to compare to the power of the arcade hardware. They should have made it so you could take three Genesis consoles and link them together with a giant cartridge. What a great idea. They should have done that. It's like $600 to play Galaxy Force.

In 1988. That's like 120 plays. Why not? Yeah. You can even go upside down. on your own couch. Then you plug the Sonic 3 and Knuckles on top of it. There's some cool stuff about this game, too.

I like the fact that it does the Mega Man thing. Yeah, you can choose your stage. Yeah, there's five stages and you can choose anyone you like, and there's some branching stages. When did Darius first come out? Was that around 87 or so? I don't remember for sure. Yeah, and Mega Man was 87.

So it seems like everyone was kind of coming up with the same sort of ideas around the same time. Well, I feel like it's a good thing. again, for something you're trying to attract people to the arcade with. It's like, okay, well, you played this and died once. You can try a different stage instead. You know, there's a whole, there's a whole bunch of different entry points you could come in with your expensive $1 or $5 credit. Right. Yeah, it's more incentive to keep playing. That's $25 and you can see all the stages. Except the last one. Except the last one. But it is kind of, it is, it actually is nice because we've talked about this before, but arcade games have a tendency to front load all the

cool stuff. And then, you know, there's just like six stages of filler. after that, and then if you can make it to the end, hey, there's something really cool again to justify the $12 you just spent. So, yeah, like this is actually, it's kind of a show of confidence, like, instead of

just creating one cool front-loading stage and then a bunch of kind of meh stages, each one is spectacular. Each one is an amazing starting point for an arcade game. It's like five fresh arcade experiences at once. That's why they let you choose. They probably didn't want all that great content. They

developed to be buried beyond the difficulty. So they're like, anyone can play anyone and see all of our great work. Yeah, and they all have a very different look because you've got the lava planet and the jungle planet and space stations and so on. So there's all kinds of different experiences. Yeah. So it's, I mean, like, I really wish I had seen this in arcades. I had never heard of it until many years later. But I feel like this is one that I would have just been drawn to magnetically. In like $5, well, that's my monthly allowance. But okay, I'm going to play a five-minute game. Of course, then it goes in as really evil because after you beat all the initial stages, you go to the final stage and you can't continue.

You die in the final stage. That's it. Yeah, I always hate that in games where arcade games do that a lot. Elevator action, too. That's my least favorite thing about the game is you get to the final showdown and you have to stop this missile launch and you get one shot at it. And if it launches or you die, the end. Yeah. Yeah, and I actually realized when I was playing this in emulation because in a way was I were going to get there in the arcade, the best strategy, really, is to die right before you beat the last initial stage so that you're going into the final stage with a fresh ship, because otherwise you can end up in the final stage, like, halfway dead already, and there's just no way.

Oh, yeah, and that's something worth talking about is that you have one life, but it has a power meter. Yeah. Another game that did that around the same time was Capcom's 1943 Battle of Midway. And it went from being, like, one-hit explosion to your ship has a power meter and the power kind of ticks down over time slowly. Fuel gauge. Yeah, it's like fuel and HP mashed together, basically. And then when you take

damage, then it ticks down really quickly. So you basically get one life and you want to manage that fuel gauge. So this does the same thing. It's a power meter and it ticks down over time. Gauntlet, man, they just Atari and Edelag, they ruin things for everyone.

I love Gauntlet. I do too, but it introduced a payment scheme and a a game mechanic kind of combined that's every bit as evil as like, you know, loot boxes or gotcha in modern games. You don't agree? I agree. Yeah.

I mean, it's, it was expensive to play, but it was fun. I think that was a good trade on. Thank you. So they did make some home conversions of Galaxy Force, but I can't really recommend them. They very, very bravely put it on Master System. And God bless them for that, but, you know...

I saw a video that's kind of sad. No, no, it's not good. The Genesis version of Galaxy Force 2 is a little better. I mean, it, you know, it did what the Genesis could do, but it just wasn't, you know, it was, you know, one-fifth the power of the arcade board. So what it could do was kind of limited. So it's a good game,

but I definitely recommend skipping old home versions and just getting M2's 3DS version. Yeah, or that, yeah, I'm sure that's nice and convenient. You have a room in your house you can spare for it, right? Yeah, everybody does. Sure. It's the Galaxy Force room. That doesn't take up that much.

The modern house poolton. The manned space cave. So, speaking of all the cool stuff front-loaded. Altered beast? Altered beast. Yeah, we didn't really actually talk about what this game is. We just talked about the animation. Yeah, it's you walk forward and punch stuff.

It has cool, yeah, it has cool voice samples that are front-loaded and then repeat it a lot throughout the game. It has this really cool animation if you're turning into a werewolf that's incredibly animated the first time it happens. and then every other stage, it's just like this blinking transition between two static spikes. Although, in fairness, like, starting with Final Fantasy 9, they did that with summons and idylons. Because in Final Fantasy 7 and 8, you got the cool animation every damn time. And, you know, by the end of the game, you're getting like Knights of the Round or Eden. And it's like, well, I'm going to summon Eden, go over to my drink, go over to my kitchen, pour myself a drink, make a sandwich, come back. Yeah, but this is a transformation that only.

happens once per stage, and even the animated version takes like three seconds. That's true. So we've been all right. But, yes, they front-loaded, and that's okay, because it is cool looking. And it's, yeah, it's cool looking. There's not a lot to it. Yeah, I mean, this is very much in the Kung Fu style of game, the Spartan X, you know, the URA big character, Spider House is another game like this from around the same time.

You walk forward, you punch stuff, things hit you, there's not a lot of... There's some zombies. you kick them in half. Yeah, you kick them and their bodies fall apart and bones are sticking out. And in its defense... I loved it, though. In its defense, it's kind of an interesting conceit to it that you start out actually fairly weak. Things take a lot of punches to kill.

And then, you know, you collect these power-ups and you get more muscles like several times in a row. And then you can, you know, start punching things in half with one punch. And, you know, it's just really satisfying. So what year was this alt, Altered Beast, 89? It was 88. We're in 88. So I was seven when this came out. I was at the peak of, like, I wanted to be an army.

guy running in the woods hitting sticks against trees and so I love beat them up games like double dragon and yeah so combined just the beat them up element plus the awesome monster as you turn into the tiger the wolf the bear

I just thought this in the dragon yeah and then like a golden wolf or something at the end I cannot remember but it's just if you get all the chaos emeralds yeah super shunning That's the other dumb thing about the system is all you need in order to do these power-ups is to kill the one flashing wolf that comes along every once in a while.

It's like a two-headed dog. Whatever it is. But like, you know, there's exactly many of these per level as you need to do your full power-up. And if you can dodge them, you can actually just walk by every other enemy. It doesn't matter. All you need is the power-ups. One thing I love about this game is that the mythology behind it makes no sense whatsoever. So you are summoned from the grave, like you're dead.

You're a warrior who has risen from his grave. Rise from your grave. Exactly. By Zeus to rescue his daughter, which I guess would be... Who was Zeus's daughter? He had a lot of them, yeah. Persephone maybe? I don't know.

One of his daughters was kidnapped, and so you have to go rescue her. Zeus's wife was Hera, right? So maybe Juno... His actual wife, yeah. Yeah. As opposed to... So anyway, you have to rescue his daughter. But then for some reason, you turn into like a weirwolf or a dragon.

Like, I did a lot of studying of Edith Hamilton's mythology in high school. And I don't remember werewolves and dragons in, you know, great myths. That's why it's so cool. I mean, this is a continuation, I think. It's a continuation of this whole series of arcade games where the visual inspiration is, whatever looked cool on a heavy metal cover last year, we're going to put that in the game. It's just like, here's some temples and weirwolves. And really weird, blobby bosses.

Werewolves of London on vacation. I don't know. going down to Greece. I love the theme of this game, though. I'm just telling you, I thought it was great when I was a kid. I still think it's neat. It's cheesy in retrospect, but at the time, it just looked awesome. It's one of those things where I was coming from playing Super Mario Bros. 2 or whatever at home,

and I went to an arcade and saw these huge, gorgeously colorful and large sprites that turn into monsters and there's kicking and action and jumping. I just loved it. Like, if you can make it hard off, it gets really weird. There's like, you know, buff unicorns. men like yeah like some crazy enemies i played i remember i did take the time to play through this all the way on maim once i you know bought that arcade stick i mentioned a long time ago just to see the whole game because i never got past maybe the second stage ever yeah i can't remember if we

talked about this game on the brototypes episode that i did in in san francisco earlier this year but this is very much that kind of game um i like ben i like what you wrote bosses look nice but are super simplistic which describes the whole enterprise really. Pretty much. That is Altered Beast. But Benj, you were not the only one who really was impressed by this game. Sega was so impressed

by it that it was Sega Genesis Pack-in. Yeah. And to me, that seems like such a weird choice but I guess it worked because you wanted a genesis because of it. Whereas I thought I was like, really, this? I mean, I guess it's better than crap. What was

the PC, the Turbo Graphics 16 pack-in. Keith Courage? Yes. Yeah, that game sucked. Yeah, we got a TurboGraphic 16, and that was such a huge letdown. Because we thought at that time, we had only played the NES and Atari stuff. So we were like, just by default, if it looks better, it has to be a better game.

We were thinking, you know, it has all this power. Right. That was the majority of video game advertising in the 80s and 90s. It looks better, so it's better. That's what we thought. Yep. Yeah, but the question of a pack-in game is very difficult, because, you don't want to give away your best game because people will buy that individually,

but you don't want to give away a bad game because then no one wants to buy the system because what's the motivation there? Like, oh, I get a system in a bad game. So it has to be like a game that's impressive in some regard, but not so good that you don't want to go buy other games. So I guess in that sense, Altered Beast is a really good choice for a pack-in game because you play it and you're like, my Nintendo couldn't do this. This is crazy looking. But then you play it for a few weeks and you're like, well, I've seen all there is to see, time to pick up Strider or Fantasy Star. Yeah, I think it almost functions as a pack in the same way it does in the arcade, like as

an attract mode, like, here, look at this cool stuff. But, okay, then you'll be done with it. It doesn't have a depth and complexity that people are used to in NES games, for example, since it was just a straight arcade port, as far as I know. Well, even other Genesis games had more depth and complexity than Altered Beast. But I guess, again, that makes it a good pack-in game because it's stunning. at first sight, but it's not so deep that you're going to be like, this is the game I'm going to play for the next two months,

and that's all I'm going to touch. It made for good advertisements when they had that giant wolfhead with the fire behind it on all the early ads. I remember that on the print. That's an iconic Sega image right there. Like you see it on T-shirts and posters. It's all over the place. Well, it's cool.

And this is one of the games that Data Discs, this was done on 3DS by M2 also, but Datadisks has released the, soundtrack for it, also for Galaxy Force 2, but I really like the job they did on the Altered Beast soundtrack, soundtrack, because, like, it's not a soundtrack that I would think, ah, yes, that's one of the all-time greats, but they put a lot of love into it. Like, they put in the voice clips very carefully, so you get that sort of sense of progression, like, going through the game. They don't overdo it, so it's not, like, distracting. It's just like this little

rise from your great... No, nothing like that. You get the right from your game, and you get that at the very beginning and then you get two tracks in and the boss says something to you and then the boss theme kicks in. So they did a nice job of like throwing in those little iconic voice samples without, you know, bludgeoning it.

Isn't it like, welcome to your doom? Yes, that's it. Yeah. Welcome to your doom. Not to be mistaken for Magneto's Welcome X-Men to die. Right. Power up. Or whatever he says. We're going to be able to be. I'm saying,

I'm going to be. You're going to I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to I'm going So that was altered So that was altered beast.

At the other end of the spectrum. It's all downhill for me. Right. We hit the high point. Now for something completely different. Tetris. Tetrits. Blocks falling from the sky. There's a Tetris. Yeah, Tetris. I forget that Sega published this. But they did. They, or at least distributed it in the arcades.

The whole Tetris saga is an episode unto itself. But basically, the people who owned the rights to it and parceled out the rights, to the West, divided them up by, like, arcade and console and computer. Actually, it might not be arcade and console. It might just be console and computer. So there was a lot of dispute over, like, who could release what, where? Lots of legal shenanigans. And this was sub-licensed from Tengen to Sega, which makes sense because they had a

relationship. Tengen was an offshoot of Atari, and Atari and Sega kind of teamed up together to publish unlicensed games on Nintendo entertainment system. And of course, Tingen had the Tetris that they published around the same time as Nintendo's Tetris. And it turned out they didn't have the license for it.

So Nintendo took them to court and basically killed the company. And this is all a part of that. I don't know. It's just kind of one of those weird like, oh, Tetris, Sega, huh? Although... Soviet Union involved, too.

In 2017, Tetris and Sega. of course go together because there is Puyo Puyo Tetrus from Sega, which is great. You played it? Yeah, I'd have it on the Switch. Yes. Yeah. It was the first game I bought for Switch because it's cool. It's awesome.

But this is not, there's no Puyo Puyo in this one. It's just Tetris. Regular Tetris, but without the good Russian music. Yeah, the music and this is kind of disappointing. Look at what I wrote. This is the last thing. Just like Tetris, but with horrible music. I don't know if I'd call it horrible, but it's,

It's not really Like, I don't know It's grading FM synthesis Yeah, maybe you watch like a bad emulation of it You pull out all your mom's pots and pans And you're like the cheese grater and stuff And you put metal forks against them That's what the music sounds

FM synthesis can be great But yes, when when done poorly, it is not great And this is an example of I would say toward the bad side of FM synthesis It's very lifeless and very kind of grating. Yeah. It's that high-pitched chainsaw, metallic. It's still Tetris, though, so it's fun to play. I did see Tetris in the arcades back in the day,

and it was very confusing to me because I was like, hey, this is that Nintendo game. But Sega! Like, this is on my Game Boy. Why am I going to? Yeah, and at the time, Nintendo was advertising it, like it was the coolest exclusive they've ever had, you know. But if you see it in the arcade,

a different name on it, it's confusing. you. I just saw a Game Boy ad that says the new game Tetris on it. Yeah. You know, and it was first created in 1984. So. Yeah, but, you know, I didn't know that at the time. I was not familiar with Elark Technica or, you know, Alexe Pazetnov or anything like that. I had no idea who Hank Rogers was. I didn't know what Mirrosoft was. I was like, what is this crazy? What is this crazy game about dropping blocks? It seems boring, but everyone says it's awesome. And I played it. I was like, I can't stop playing. Yeah. So that's, you know, like for those of us who weren't following PC games from Russia at the time, as very few of us did. Yeah, Nintendo's marketing strategy worked okay for that. There was a Spectrum HoloBite port that was probably before then. That was the PC version. But I'm just saying it was interesting.

Nintendo could say the new game Tetris, there is no way to know otherwise. I mean, there's no internet you could look at it. Yeah, I couldn't check Wikipedia. So there you go. Yep. Okay. So that's Tetris. And now for something also completely different from Tetris, going kind of more in the power, wait, wait, not power, the Galaxy Force direction. And that is Power Drift. Another Super Scalar.

Yep. And I had never heard of this until they came out on the 3DS archives. I had to have seen it before either. And I... There's no US release as far as I know, other than recently. Right. Yeah. Actually, no, I did not know about it because of the M2 collection. I knew about it because I discovered it while I was doing a Game Boy Works episode on some other racing game because I think the company that did Dead Heat Rally for Game Boy ported this game to TurboGraphic 16. And let me tell you, that's not a very impressive port. The TG16, the Genesis didn't have the power to emulate the Y board in its full glory, but the PC engine definitely did not. And so I found out about this game just like a few months before it was announced for the 3DS collection. So I was like very excited to finally be able to play this game that I had just discovered.

And it's pretty rad. Although like a lot of racing games, there's not a lot to it. It's kind of just the same thing over and over again. But, you know, it's all about the presentation and all about the feel and the experience. And it feels great. And it's so fast. And it's so dynamic. It's got these cool 3D tracks.

Yeah, you can go like over and under yourself. Yeah, you know, as a kid growing up with Nintendo systems, like I went from NES to super NES with Mode 7, and I saw stuff like F0 and Top Gear and Mario Kart. I was like, wow, cool, 3D racing. Now that I'm older and I know more video game history, I'm like, yeah, F0, it's fast, but it's so flat. Whereas power drift is so not flat. And it kind of looks like the world is made of Lincoln logs because it's, it's, you know, super-scaler.

So they're creating tracks out of, yeah, like just sprites in front of sprites. But it's, it's so fast and it's so dynamic and lively that you don't really notice. It's just, like, tracks that rise up and you have jumps and bumps. They rise up from their gauge. They do rise up from the grave. The graves of 2D bit maps. I don't know. But I'm like, because it's drag racing, you've got these flat little cars.

So the viewpoint is very low to the ground. And so it makes this all very dramatic. It looks like cart racing, like Mario Kart or something. I mean, I really feel like this was kind of the original cart raiser. You think it inspired Mario Kart in any way? I mean, it doesn't have that silly. There's no power-up items. I mean, it's pretty silly.

Like, yeah, it doesn't have the power-ups, but the characters are very, like, ridiculous. Like, there's the main characters that do to the Mohawk. Environments are colorful and that sort of thing. And, like, the layout. And there's drifting, too. So it kind of has that element of Mario Kart. The layout of some of these actually reminds me of all the way up to, like, Mario 64. since that was sort of when Mario Kart really started doing 3D

because it wasn't 3D. And so they could finally do this sort of very three-dimensional layouts that this game has where you have, you know, kind of roller coaster almost like tracks. I mean, they show it off in the very first stage where you have, like, the track is a figure eight, and the reverse loop, the one that comes back around, crosses over and actually goes above the first leg

of the track. So you can actually see the track that you're going to be racing on as you drive beneath it. And then you make the sharp, you know, circular turn, the half turn, and then you go up over the ramp and you're above where you were driving before. And then you circle back around and go underneath. It's, it's really impressive. Like, I feel like if I had seen this game in 1988, I would have just been like, what? Yeah. Huh? Yeah, that's would have blown me away, too. It just looks crazy. I really want to play it now, but I've never played it. So. And around the same time, it is on 3DS. It's on the collection.

And you can get the collection for like 20 bucks. And it's eight games, I think, nine games. So it's absolutely worth it. If you don't own the Sega 3D classics collection for 3DS, just please, if you're listening to this podcast, for the love of God, go buy it. It's so good. It's so essential. Everything is created with such loving care.

And, you know, maybe if enough people buy it, Sega will be like, oh, we should release the third volume in America finally. Because there's another volume out in Japan. Oh, really? Those games haven't come here. and I want them. I'm surprised the 3DS has the power to play these. It's amazing what the 3DS can do.

You know, like, it's like 20, 68,000 stack together. That's the power of the 3DS, man. You only need three or four of those for a while. That'd be funny if you open one up and it's just a bunch of giant. The arm processor is actually just a bunch of 68,000s. All the time is an array, yeah. Yep. That's great.

If you shake a 3DS around, you can hear the 68,000's rattling. But yeah, this is a really crazy game. I really, really wish I had seen this before, you know, back when it was new, because there's not much depth to it now. So it's kind of hard to play for more than five minutes at a time. But it's really cool. And it feels like Outrun on steroids in a way. It doesn't have the chill vibe of Outrun, but instead it's more like, you're a crazy dude to the Mohawk in a go cart. Go.

It's outrun on roller coasters, basically. Yes. Steroid roller coasters. Rollercoaster steroids. A roller coaster ride at steroids. Have you? How did that go for you? Head up and downs.

All right. Welcome to your gum. I fired it. Oh, on that So, um, finally, the last game to mention for 1988, Sega did release some other games. in these years, but they're not as remarkable. So we're just kind of touching on the big ones.

The last one that I think really deserves mention is a game that I don't even know if it's a cult classic. I feel like it's grossly underappreciated. It's just a cult. You control a cult, actually. Like, I had never seen this, but I'd heard the name, but I had never really seen her look at it before.

Back when I was, you know, a crazy arcade rat in 1989, 1990, I had a friend, the guy that I used to like to hang out at arcades with a lot, who was always raving about this game. I played it, I was like, what the hell? What is this? I didn't really get it at the time, but he came from more of a PC gaming background

and played a lot of RPGs and strategy games. Like, he was the one who introduced me to Final Fantasy because it was kind of like a way for him to play pools of radiance on his NES, which he thought was really cool because he played both. And so this game really does have like a PC strategy vibe to it, despite being an arcade game.

I mean, I put in the notes that it's basically like the Ur-Moba in a sense. It really, it's not quite the same because you're not like holding down a spot and dealing with enemies that are coming at you in a line. So it's not, you know, like pure Dota or whatever. But it's the same sort of like enemy mobs

with various behaviors going. And it's very much about like you have unique characters. There's 20 total characters in the game. You control one at a time. And your goal is to reach a place on screen, like an exit to the next stage or to kill all the enemies.

and you have to master how each character moves like their different stats, their speed and their strength and how they're weapons fire. Like you have some characters who throw boomerangs that kind of, you know, do like right turns.

You have some characters that shoot horizontally left and right rather than, you know, in any direction. Then you have characters who throw spears and those go straight up the screen. Well, and there's this, there's this three-dimensionality to it.

It's this very flat-looking game. So it's a top-down view and you've just got these single-screen boards that you're dealing with, but then there can be, like, walls and buildings and stuff, like almost like, you know, like a Fire Embell map or something. And people can be stationed up on top of them. And so, you know, some of the characters have weapons that can actually arc up and hit the guys on the walls, and some of them don't. So you kind of got to know what to use. It was like... Yeah, it's, um, it, I, like, I totally didn't grasp it at the time,

but it came out on virtual console about two years ago. And so I really sat down with it because I was doing, like, weekly retro roundups of the virtual console. And I played, you know, the first, like, 10 stages and really got into it. It's really cool. And I need to go back. I don't think M2 has remade this one on 3D classics, which is a shame, because it does have, it does have, like, the dimensionality of the projectiles and the, like, they really ought to do this one.

And it's also great would be great for portable because it's, you know, it's divided into these single screen puzzle fights. Well, the one, the one drawback for it is that it is one, kind of a throwback to the early 80s arcade, because it's a vertical format screen. It's right. It's right. oriented, yeah. Now, if they wanted to do this on Switch, where I can turn the system sideways, and if only someone would release a vertical grip for the Switch, damn it, then this would be

really great. I think this is a game that really has been wildly overlooked and underrated, and I really feel like its time has come to be celebrated by the public. You have to stare at it for a while to let you pull it in, because I started, like I said, I hadn't seen this before, and I started looking at it. And, you know, you first see it. You see this, like, overhead shooting. you're like okay this is like overhead contra or something but it's really slow it's but it's really brown and dull yeah and i'm like this looks dull and boring and then i started watching as the stages got more and more puzzly and they collect more and more characters because you actually start out with only a few of them and you have to pick up the other ones as you go through the stages

and save them and like it just kind of opens up and it has permanent yeah so there's that fire emblem element of the character dies and you go to the next stage that's it you don't have that one anymore so it's a rogue like no i'm just kidding no it's really not so So what do the controls look like in the arcade? I want to say it's just a stick and button. It's been a long time since I've seen the arcade. I haven't actually seen the arcade version. I tried it the once and was like, huh?

Yeah. But I do remember playing it, and I'm pretty sure, like, nothing was weird about the control setup. So I think that was, it was just like sticking buttons. And this had an American release in the arcade? Yeah, absolutely. Unless, you know, someone in Lubbock, Texas at the mall was like, I got to get me this Japanese game.

I got to have it freighted over. I don't think that happened. It did make it out on Sega Genesis. So maybe Genesis fans are like hiding it from us. They're like you, Nintendo kids. You don't deserve to know about it. But yeah, I just don't really see this game celebrated that much. You'll find retrospectives at places like hardcore gaming 101.

And it does seem like there's some people who are in the know, but it just, it hasn't gotten the acclaim that I think it deserves. It looks really easy to misunderstand, like you said, just because of, it has way more depth than you see on the surface. Yeah, this is, this is sort of the antithesis to the front loading, the cool stuff. Backloading. It really doesn't do that. You have to have to get into it in order to see what that's off. Like the screen format means it does kind of need to play in the arcades because, you know, it's got the vertical screen, which you can't do at home. But everything else about it really doesn't, it doesn't say.

hey, this was a great arcade experience. It's not visually impressive. It's slow. It's complex. It was really brave of Sega to do this. And I think, you know, a company that had sort of the scale of Sega, you know, that had such a huge arcade business and distribution model, I think they could get away with doing something like that. But I don't think this really did that well at arcades. It's a miracle that I saw it back in the day. But just the once. Um, I think my friend was the only one who, who got the game and who liked it, because I never saw anyone else playing it, but, um, it was a day you'll never forget. It was. I, well, I haven't forgotten any yet, but we'll see how senility does as I get a little older. Anyway, so that's 1988, and we're kind of getting close to, getting close to the hour mark here. So instead of going directly to 89, um, why don't we go to the letters? All right. So from Captain N-2, Not much to share other than that

I loved Golden Axe back in the day. We'll talk about that shortly. The rousing music, the bold title screen with those huge Japanese letters. Oh, yeah, I forgot about the kanji. They didn't bother to scrub that out in America. That was kind of alien and cool, yeah. And the neat turtle island and eagle stages.

It was all really striking for its day and definitely stood out against the more unusual street-themed brawlers. And you could mount and ride beasts as well. Playing the home version on Genesis later certainly highlighted what a thin experience the game actually was, but in the arcade, it was glorious. Yeah, multiplayer, beat him up with... Yeah, we'll talk about that. Okay, from DJ Fab Fresh. Interesting. And the Fresh Prince? Here's one that we're not actually going to be talking about,

so I'm glad he mentioned it. I didn't play it in the day, but I recently got an O-Rail PCB by West One, or Westone and Sega. The combination of 3D graphics and the overhead tank action is unique and fun. Also, the game has a nice atmosphere in the designs and opening cinema, despite the game not being story-heavy in any way. It is a lost title in a sense, but a great one. What is it called? A-R-A-I-L. Like A-U-R-A-I-L.

Like A-U-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-I. I think I saw this one in the arcade. The name tugs at the back of my brain, but yeah, I didn't put this one on the list to talk about this episode. Sorry about that DJ Fab Fresh. I played a lot of power drift on the Saturn, and the 3DS port is stunning, but sadly I never got to try it on the machine. Sega had a lot of cool stuff like AB Cop, which I wish I had gotten to play. Turbo Outrun was solid, but made me not as memorable as the original despite the bells and whistles, like crashing into items on the racecourse, weather, nitros. I played a chunk of that on the FM

Towns Marty before the person who was supposed to fix my machine disappeared off the face of the earth with my copy of the game. Damn. Turbo outruns seem more like a precursor to cruise in USA than a true sequel to the original Outrun, more loud and gauzy, gaudy racing than relaxing and beautiful driving. And another comment from Lee Lubday. Hey, all, I don't know if this is the kind of thing you're after, but during the late 80s to early 90s, I was a teenager growing up in South Wales, and spending most weekends getting into the train to Swansea pretty much just to tour the arcades.

First up, Golden Axe an Alien Storm at the Carousel Arcade in the city center. I remember seeing someone trigger that classic Golden Axe into. sequence and just casually walk away as we all stood and stared. I was never that cool. Then we take the bus down to Mumbles Pier. Yes, that's an actual name and an actual thing. To throw some more money at Altered Beast and Power Drift

and a couple of years later, Golden Axe's Revenge of Death Adder. I also played a lot of ESWAT in the University Common Room until Street Fighter 2 arrived and everything changed and nobody cared about ESWAT anymore. I've never thought about the Welsh gaming scene before. That's pretty cool. Oh, yeah, I was singing New South Wales. yeah so jazz riddle could probably tell you about the welsh gaming scene he's he i think grew up

in wales so he probably cut his teeth in welsh arcades and then went on to be in zap 64 and so forth yeah need to get him on again true veteran maybe he was at the same arcades as her letter could be maybe this was jazz and disguise yeah all right um from infernal bandicoot coot hello retronauts long time listener first time caller i have been a fan of Sega games ever since saw my brother play Sonic 2 on Genesis when I was a wee baby. Now, I wasn't alive when the games of today's subject came out, but later in life, I've always been intrigued by Sega arcade games, especially their 80s and 90s releases. One of my favorite Sega games in that era is the Super Scalar Powerhouse Galaxy Force 2. I first heard about this game seeing

videos of the Genesis version of the game, which looked interesting with its front-facing 3D perspective and great music. However, I noticed that something must have been lost in translation when porting it under there, so I went to see what the arcade version looked like, and I was blown away with the level of depth being done in a game from 1988. While the beautiful graphics powered by three Motorola 68,000s really wowed me, the amazing soundtrack by Koichi Namiki and Katsuhiro Hayashi really got me hooked onto Galaxy Force, and I went searching to get a good version of the game in my hands. Then I came across the 1998 Sega Saturn release online,

and even though I didn't own a Saturn at the time, I bought it. Anyway, when I got the game, I popped the CD into my computer and listened to the great music over and over again. Oh, man, remember when games had Red Book audio on them? Yeah. I did that, too. Yeah. Except for the end of the night. They only had the one track. Oh, yeah, you're right. This is not a PlayStation blockadisc. Okay,

I'm thinking of a different game. Twisted metal, too? Could be. Pusted Metal 2? Maybe. Maybe. Street Fighter 2 collection for PlayStation had it. That was awesome. Let's see. Once I got my Saturn much later, I played as much as I could. Sure, the frame rate was cut in half, and that I only got to finish the game once after multiple

playthroughs, but I had a blast. So when I found out that Sega and M2 were releasing Galaxy Force 2 on 3DS, I instantly bought it, and having basically an arcade-perfect port of it on the go was just mind-blowing to me. Once they announced the Sega 3D classics collections, which included Galaxy Force and Power Drift much later, I just had to double dip, and this is usually the version I play nowadays. However, during a visit to the Museum of Moving Image in New York last year, I was able to play Galaxy Force in the original Super Deluxe Arcade Cabinet. Okay, I need to find out where a museum of moving images. Have you guys ever heard of that?

Yeah, I have. Is that New York City or St. I don't think it's in New York City. It's... Like Rochester or something? Yeah, it's not in Rochester. It's somewhere. Buffalo. I remember Ralph Bayer talking about it. Okay. Because he went there and donated some stuff to that place. prototypes.

By the time I got there, the missile button didn't work, thus making it impossible to even get far into the game. I was just stoked that I actually got to play the original arcade version on real hardware, so it didn't bother me too much. And so Galaxy Force 2 became one of my favorite Sega arcade games. The frantic gameplay, interesting visuals, and amazing soundtrack make it a fun ride. I recommend anyone with a Sega Saturn or 3DS to seek it out. That's from Electric Bugaloo, not Infernal Bandicoot. He has two names apparently. And it looks like just one more letter from Norm Norm.

Instead of just mentioning my typical arcade experience with Sega games, I would rather talk about all the unique and really fun titles that were lost to time. Hot Rod was a regular at most arcades and was very popular due it to its multiplayer accessibility. I have not heard of that one. Have you? Hot Rod? Hot Rod? No. I know the Transformer, but...

You stump the retronauts. He gets the no prize. Then there was Dunkshot. Sorry, it's 1987, but it deserves mention. and the incredible A-Rail. So apparently we're bozos for not. Not knowing A-R-R-R-R-R-O-Ship. Or the rarely-seen Ruff Racer, our arcade had a lot of rare imports, and A-B-Cop.

Again, another that we missed out on, looked over. Since Sega doesn't usually receive the nostalgic love of companies like Nintendo, it's kind of sad to see these great games just be forgotten. So let's say that A-Rail is the skyscipper of the Sega Pantheon. Very good. So, are any of those in the third M3 collection that we haven't got? I don't know. I'd have to look that up.

So, yeah, that wraps it up for the letters. So why don't we take a break? It liquored up and come back for 1989. Sounds good to me. Just like we did in 1989. It's pre-teen alcohols. With Domino's week-long carry-out deal, you can carry out large three-topping pizzas, and now, medium-threat-hand-made pan pizzas for $7.99 each. It's fantastic news. Cut, cut. Puns?

You mean pans? Calling all panatics for two layers of cheese on crispy golden crust. So grab your panty packs because Domino's large three-topping pizzas and medium three-topping handmade pan pizzas are $7.99 each. It's pandemonium. Bandastico. Carry out only. You must ask for this limited time offer. Price's participation and charges may vary.

So, Bob, I've noticed that, you know, living in Berkeley, California, you've become a real radical hippie type. That's true. And I don't have a lot of living space. My kitchen is a hallway with a stove in it, as I say. Yeah, so I've noticed that while I gather a lot of games to, you know, chronicle and photograph, you believe that physical possessions are a burden. Yes, everything is transitory, Jeremy. It's what Buddha tells us.

So I guess for gaming, you prefer not to own, but rather to rent, to acquire. That sounds like a great proposition. Is there a service that I could take advantage of? Well, Bob, as a matter of fact, there is. There is a service called Gamefly, the best way to. to buy and rent all your favorite games, but you could just rent if you want. Okay, that's good.

And you're saying, okay, so I get a game and I'm done with it, and then it's the mailman's problem, right? Pretty much. Good. I can't stand that guy. You don't have to possess. You don't have to worry about the burden

of physical possessions weighing you down. You have more than 9,000 titles to choose from, and I know that you don't have space in your home for 9,000 games. That is very true. I actually got the landlord to check that out for me, and there's only room for 8,000, and I don't want to break any building codes.

Right. So, yeah, Gamefly, Let you try your favorite games and movies before you buy if you ever want to buy them. I don't know if you ever would. And you can keep the games as long as you want, which is great for, you know, the big, meaty RPGs that you tend to enjoy. So do our listeners have some sort of incentive to use this fine service you call Gamefly? Why, yes. And as a matter of fact, they're offering Retronauts listeners a free premium 30-day trial by going to Gamefly.com slash Retronauts.

It'll let you check out two games and or movies at a time. and it's only available by going to Gamefly.com slash Retronauts. Hey, my name is James Petrigallo. I'm Jimmy Wiseman. Please join us every single Tuesday for crime in sports. So fun. You like sports? You don't have to.

Let's just set up a context and find out what an idiot did wrong. I'm like it. I'm in. We're going to do that each and every week. We take an athlete. We break them down. We make fun of everything he's ever done. But in order to do that, we have to build up and tell you all about their career and get you to what, James?

To grace. And then watch them fall from grace. doesn't like that. Join us. Big criminals, small criminals. Sports you've never heard of. It doesn't matter. It's the crime. It's the comedy. It's such a good time. Join us every Tuesday for crime in sports. You can join us every Tuesday of podcast.com, the podcast one app, or subscribe on all Apple products. Find us every Tuesday and laugh at people. My favorite thing about Sega's arcade games from the 80s is the crazy super-scarler technology we've talked about in this episode. All those sprites flying out on the screen at you? The only thing more immersed is,

is, well, real life. But if you want to zoom down the highway with trees and billboards streaking past like in a video game, you're going to need to buy a car. And for that, you're going to want to use True Car. True Car can connect you with a network of more than 13,000 dealers and give you a look at their actual inventory of more than 700,000 pre-owned vehicles. On top of that, once you register with True Car, you can get a look at actual numbers on what people in your local market have paid for cars. That way, it's a cinch to see if the car you want is even available for purchase, and get a sense of its real market value. and even read-up on all the retailer incentives you have available.

TrueCar will put you in touch with a local TrueCar certified dealer for a quick, easy buying experience. So far, True Car customers have saved an average of more than $3,000 off MSRP across more than 3 million cars sold. So when you're ready to buy, visit True Car to enjoy a more confident car buying experience. Some features not available in all states. All right. We're back. We're back and binge. I need you to keep delivering the funny this half. You've set a high bar for yourself.

off. So we expect you to live up to this from now on. I'll do my best. All right. So I'd like to think, think, not think, think, the people who wrote in to mention A.B. Cop and R.R.R. Because they're pretty cool. We just looked this up. So A.B. Cop is another super scalar one, but it's you're on a hover bike. You can use some sweet jumps and stuff, and you're a cop going after, like, bio-mutants in the future. Yeah, you're basically the first boss is like the big tank. guy from

Maximum Carnage or Smash TV. Yeah, this is this big Mad Max looking dude on a chassis, like. It looks fun. Yeah, look cool. And then, um... We looked up Hot Rod too, but that... Hot Rod looked up for me to drive me nuts.

That's one of those tiny top-down racers that really sucks, actually, and I hate. Yeah. Yeah. It didn't look fun. Sorry. But you can still like it, whoever wrote that. Was that like Ivan Stewart's off-road?

Who was that, the... The top-dance? Stewart. Yeah. Yeah. Super Sprint by Atari was one of the prototypical one of this because it was based on the Sprint series from Atari. Yeah. And they haven't really evolved much since the 70s. Nope. Nope. Well, but you can't win them all. And definitely A.B. Cop and Allrail are games that I would love to see Sega dredge up. And so again, thanks to the writers who submitted comments in response to our call for mail because you exposed us to things we never would have seen. seen otherwise. Anyway, now it's on to the year 1989. What happened in

1989? The Berlin Wall fell. Yeah, that's about it. Nothing else. Well, the Genesis came out in the U.S., as I mentioned. George Bush became president. What was the prominent NES games, 89? Like Mega Man 2.

Mega Man 2 and Ninja Guiden and... Castlevania 3? No, that was 1990. 90. Okay. It was the holding year between Super Mario Bros. 2 and 3. It was. Man, I feel like all the good games were 88 or 90 or 90. Yeah.

Do we have hype for Super Mario 3 yet? When did the wizard come out? In 90. That was in 90. I'm pretty sure. Yeah. But, you know, game magazines are starting to, like, show screenshots of the Japanese Super Mario Brothers 3 that came out in 88.

We had to wait a year and a half. So, yeah, so people in the know were all like, Super Mario 3. My uncle works at Nintendo, we wink. George, yeah, George Bush was president. Became president, yes. He was inaugurated that year. Is that when he vomited broccoli on Japan, or was that going to come later?

All over Japan. I think it was early on. And here comes your broccoli. Couldn't be prudent. So, 1989 in the world of Sega, it's actually also kind of a little bit like, there's really, there's good stuff here, but none of it is. It was just like, this changed the world. I guess everyone was just kind of burned out on the 80s.

We were starting to realize that maybe greed isn't good. And maybe cocaine wasn't the best thing ever. So people were readying their flannel. Yeah, they were like, I need to start stocking up on flannel and burkenstocks because Nirvana's coming in a couple of years. All right. So the first game we have is Mystic Defender, which I had never. Mystic Defender was in the Farmers All right.

The Nirvana was coming. It sounds more like a cult thing, actually. The Farmer's Almanac, you know, it tells you what the weather's going to be like all year long, you know, so... Expect Nirvana. Okay. All right. So, Mystic Defender.

Mystic Defender. Yeah, this one didn't really click with me. Yeah, it's a really weird game. So my first thought when I saw this was, oh, it's a Sega side-scrolling kind of melee platformer. So it's like Ken Satan almost. But Ken Satan was much more like medieval Japanese Castlevania, whereas this is something else.

It's more fantasy thing. It's kind of out there. You've got all these attacks that you can charge up into these big screen-wide attacks or other special things. That's what makes it really weird. Like as an arcade game, I don't really quite get this. It's very slow-paced because when you play, you charge up your attacks.

And it takes a while because you have a little media. it goes Yeah, and you're like vulnerable while you're doing it. So like enemies will come in. So it's like, yeah, you spend a lot of time retreating and charging up

and then moving forward to attack while you're executing your charged action. I feel like this would probably be pretty good on a console. Did it come out on Genesis? I think I've seen a home port of this. Yeah, okay.

It seems like the kind of game that would have shown up early on Genesis. But yeah, as an arcade game, this doesn't quite connect for me. Or even the master system port. Yeah, there were definitely, I saw videos of ones that were much less graphically impressive, but the same game, basically. It just seems like, I don't know, it seems like one of those nameless, faceless, forgettable Sega games to me.

I mean, that's how I felt it. All right, next. All right. I don't know why I put Flashpoint on here. I don't know what that game is, and I don't care. I looked up. It's Tetris, but it starts, it's puzzle Tetris, basically. So you start with a pre-made.

But it's not Tetris Flash. No, no. You like start with a pre-made board that has some stuff on it, and there's, like, one particular block you're trying to clear. Oh, that is Tetris Flash. Kind of. That's basically what it was. Huh. Yeah. It had a whole set of puzzles. Okay, maybe I should have looked into the history of this game. I just ignored it. Whoops.

But other than that, sorry about that. Listeners, ha, ha, ha, me and my due diligence. So then there's dynamite ducks, which I always mistake for a dynamite deca. So this one I actually played through, played through the whole thing. Dukes. I read the Katakana. Two. I played through this because I actually wrote this up for GameSpite Quarterly back in the day when that was a thing. Okay. Tell me about this game because I've only seen it in videos.

Yeah. So it's, I mean, it's obviously, it's a beat-em-up of the type that was sort of getting more popular. So, you know, if you think about, like, the Simpsons arcade game. Does it have a duck in it? It has two ducks. It's ducks. Ducks. The, like, bare framework of story for this game is this random girl gets kidnapped and instead of

her boyfriend saving her, like usual, her two pet ducks set off to save her, and that kind of sets the tone. It's like blastermaster. Kind of, in reverse. It kind of sets the tone for the game, which is very cartoony and weird. Yeah, it's like Howard the duck as a bancho. Yeah. So, and there's a red duck and a blue, well, they're like dressed in red and dressed in blue. So it's like Bimmy and Jimmy. But it's very like, it's like trying to channel Tex Avery, it seems like. So there's all these very cartoony enemies and they have weird animations when they die and there's like penguins and wolves and spherical cows and all kinds of weird stuff spherical cows there's some spherical cows yeah uh easy for cow tipping so so so and

it's it's your standard beat him up a kind of isometric look again like like simpsons or turtles or all those other ones that were coming out in a little while um but so you so you had eight way movement and an attack so um you know there was there was something to it in terms of strategy but your basic attack is super short range but fast. Yeah, that's what that's what hardcore gaming 101's article said. It's like it's weird because your your attacks are extremely short range. Really short. Like you have to be right next to enemies to hit them. Yeah. And also most enemies die in one hit. Yeah, but then you get these hordes of enemies. So you have to kind of like rapid tap your punch and you can plow your way through them. At least that works at the beginning.

But then there start being too many. But there's also like tons of temporary weapons you can pick up so you can get you can get guns you can get like little novelty punching things and then but then you get all the way up to like heat seeking missiles and and stuff like that um i have a question though this doesn't look like a sega game to me is it developed was it developed by somebody else it does have like the same vibe as bonanza brothers actually that sort of it's almost like a european vibe yeah but it's from sega yeah it's got like the big chunky bubble letters that you saw in amiga games all the time. I definitely got the feeling they were trying to emulate cartoons because, you know,

you had the big sprites that you could do that style with at this point. We saw that RRAL was developed by Westone and it was published by Sega. So maybe this was just published by Sega. I think it was developed by Sega. The Euro Brothers. Yeah, I don't know. And the other cool thing about it, though, is that it's got these huge bosses, a lot of which are like multi-sprite affairs and they do these like, you know, pseudo-3D rotating

strikes around kind of like you see in games like Gunstar Heroes later. And you also have red and blue here. Yeah, you have red and blue here. So, yeah, I don't know if there's some connection there. Probably not. Probably not. But that's a very, that's a striking thing about it compared to other games at the time. But it also quickly gets really, really hard just because it does the arcade thing

where it wants you to pump in the quarter. So it just throws gobs and gobs of crap at you until you die, basically, once you get a few levels in. So I was not able to find any information, but it's, is Dynamite Ducks any relation to Dynamite DECA, which became somehow related to the diehard arcade game? I have that no idea. Okay.

There's like this whole... This whole segment of, like, mid-90s Sega games that I hear about a lot is like, you know, it mentioned in like, you know, sort of pitch-fork hipster ways. Like, you should know this game if you're cool, but I don't know this game. I guess I'm not cool.

I don't know. Yeah. I thought you set the tone for, what was hipster. I didn't know that. You should be the one, the taste maker. I don't have a tiny little... Tell people it's not cool.

I mean, you're wearing a trucker hat and you've got a beard, so I feel like you're ahead of the curve here. I'm behind the curve. It could be. Clean-shaven, that's hipster. That's me. I'm wearing a craft brew hat, so, you know, anyways. It says created by Sega AM2.

Okay, yeah. Okay. They just decided they were going to do cartoons for this one. Wait a minute. It says 1988 here on Wikipedia. What? We're way out of line. Source citation needed.

It's that cool to have like a different aesthetic for one game here. But, yeah, it's pretty much your standard beat-em-up with a lot of weapons. We did see in like 1985, maybe into 1986, a lot of Sega games that had a cartoony vibe. There was a different kind of cartoony vibe. This is like a different style. This does not look like a Po or Alex Kidd or anything like that, but, you know, Sega did kind of work in that mode sometimes. And I guess they were trying to branch out. Maybe just look less anime.

Yeah, I think they were going for an American cartoon style. That's really the feel I get from it. So what they wanted to do. So it's cool. I kind of pulled it off. Yeah, I mean, better than most Americans who try to do anime. Yeah. It's no Sudeki.

That's for sure. All right. So the big game, I think, for 1989, is Golden X, which. That showed up everywhere. It's beloved. It's had modern day revivals. So we had the cabinet for this in my undergrad dorm one year. So I played a lot of goldenbacks.

All right. So tell us about it. Everyone knows Goldenax, right? And your undergrad year. But let's pretend that what everyone does. Like people wrote in to say, oh, yeah, AB cop, that game. What is that game? Not everyone knows.

We're here to inform. Another side scrolling kind of beat him up. But in a fantasy vein. So this is another one where the whole aesthetic is, you know, your fantasy metal album cover. So you've got your Barbarian and your Valky and your dwarf as playable characters. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if the metal people got it from the video game. There were definitely metal albums with this aesthetic before the late 80s.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. This is like fantasy album, like book cover, you know. I think Boris Mallejo did cover art, like official art for. or Golden Axe? Yeah, I think there is a way of pin-up for this. Yeah, yeah. And it's totally his style, too.

It's like, you know, oily barbarian dude and a loincloth and a woman wearing basically a bikini and then a chunky little elf, dwarf dude, or not a dwarf. Yeah, your stereotypical dwarf. Yeah, it's all very pulling on the tropes. And it's got, you know, all these fantasy enemies, orcs and dragons and little monsters. it actually has and as our letter writer mentioned

you can actually ride on some of the creatures which is pretty cool one thing I'd forgotten until I went back Yeah and okay And when you ride on the creatures You're not just like riding them around

Like when you attack They breathe fire at Yeah or like swing their tail Swing their tail Yeah one of the things So one of the things grind Yeah the little parrot dinosaur And that guy is actually an altered beast

I had forgotten until I was watching An Altered Beast play through for this episode That in like level three or four of Altered Beast those guys show up and you punch them. That's why I like this game. But now you get to ride them, so they're cuter. But yeah, you get to ride dinosaurs and also all the characters have magic that you collect magic vials and power it up to various levels.

Yeah, I never really understood the magic system. It seems like, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like you collect magic files or potions or whatever, and they add up underneath. And instead of being like you have that many charges to attack with magic, It's basically like you get one magic attack and the more magic files you have for it, the more powerful the attack is. So there are different kinds of attacks at different levels depending on how many potions you have and you use them all at once, basically. Yeah, you use them all at once, but each character has a different meter that has different breakpoints on it. So like one of the characters only takes a few vials to power up and one of the characters takes a lot of vials. But your meter will have these little break points, those lines across it.

And if your number of vials passes that breakpoint, your magic basically spell goes up from level one to level two to level three. And then, you know, usually the strategy almost everyone seems to use is just go until you get the level three spell because then that's a screen clearing special at that point that looks really, really cool. Yeah, it's kind of like the altered beast like animation thing going like everything explodes explodes up screen. Yeah, so like one of them, is it the Valkyrie that has the fire dragons? I don't know. One of them has a fire spell.

And if you set it off a level one, it's just some dink you, little fire spell. But if you build it up all the way to level three, it's like the gradiest fire snakes come all the way across the screen and clear everything out. But yeah, it was always frustrating to me because it's like a one and done. It's a one and done and then you got to build it back out. You can't like, you know, use your magic strategically. It's basically like hoard, hoard, hoard. Go. Yeah, I mean, you save it until you have a screen that's got a couple bosses and a bunch of mooks on it and then you clear it out. You have one of those backup bombs that kills everything on that. Pretty much. But it takes a long time to recharge.

It's like an entire stage. Yeah, like you could play it using your your magic as you get it for dinky little spells, but I never see anyone actually do it that way. Like, you just, you want the cool big ones. Yeah, so I don't know that the magic system is necessarily that well-balanced, but, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a 1989 multiplayer cooperative brawler.

What do you want? Yeah. None of those games are particularly well-balanced. There's not a lot of tough to it. Are there three main characters? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The barbarian, the valky and the dwarf. Yeah. Yeah. So, there's that little Julius Thunderhead. Really? It's the name of the dwarf. There's a bonus stage where you, there's a little elf that steals

your stuff or whatever and you kick him and you yeah it's great that yeah between stages like you sleep in a campfire you're camping it sleeping in a campfire and you have little grimlins who come steal your and they actually take away from your meter when they do it they come steal your pushers out of your meter but then you wake up and you can kick them and get them back and if you're fast enough you can kick them more than kick out more than they stole and end up coming out

ahead but it's really frustrated because you know it's your usual like isometric brawler and so if you're a little too far ahead or behind you'll miss and it's and they're these little enemies so it's super easy to whiff on them and end up with less magic than you started with. You actually kick behind their head. Yeah, yeah. But sometimes they show up in the levels, too, and you can get more kicks in and build up your magic that way.

So, yeah, there's not a lot of depth to it. You're basically punching stuff and saving your magic and trying not to get killed by the bosses. But it looks really good. Yeah, it looks good. Good theme. Someone, I'm pretty sure someone in my dorm got to where they could beat the game using their toes.

Like they would sit on the back of the couch and use their toes on the cabinet. And then we played next would use a Lysol wipe. I feel like Golden X, I don't know, I was used to seeing beat-em-ups like Double Dragon or, you know, street-theme beat-em-ups or futuristic beat-em-ups. This felt like one of the first fantasy-themed side-scrolling beat-em-ups that I had seen. I mean, there might have been something before. Yeah, you'd get, like, action games in this vein a lot. I mean, there's a ton of old games that were.

There's something called Black Tiger. Yeah, Black Tiger by Capcom like that. But this, I don't know. felt like a great time for that theme, everything. Yeah. Yeah, I think it all came together kind of. Yeah, and I like that it's not just standard you know, hoary fantasy tropes.

They do some interesting things like the letter writer mentioned. You have a stage that takes place on the back of a turtle that like does it go through the lake? Yeah, it goes across. So the map is really cool. There's this like parchment-looking map that you see between stages and it kind of takes this

quill pen and scrolls where you're going. And yeah, at some point you get onto this turtle and the turtle moves across. to the other side. And then there's an eagle later on that flies out of the village that's also... Never got that far. Yeah, yeah, the Eagles towards the end, I think. I played through this with a friend once in the arcade,

and it was, you know, limited but fun. And I did it once and said, I don't have to do this again. Well, there's a Golden Axe, too, wasn't there? There was. And then there was Golden Axe Battler. I don't think I played that. And that was a fighting game, right?

And then there was Golden Axe Warrior, which was the Zelda clone. Oh, yeah. I did not get to those. But now. So then we come to Crackdown, which I feel like is almost kind of like a spiritual sequel or follow-up to gain ground. It's a different game, but it's a top-down cooperative game, and it's very slow-paced and very sort of complex. It looks fascinating to me because I love co-op games.

Yeah, so the co-op part of it is very interesting. So it's this top-down thing where you're trying to infiltrate bases in place. bombs to blow them up. But you can do two-player. And so it's, and you can go different directions. So it's this split screen where each person has their own screen of where they are. On the same monitor. On the same monitor. And then there's this map spread across the top that has these little boxes that show where each of you are. And you can actually, you know, you can come together and overlap and go apart again. So it's, yeah, it's an interesting co-op setup. It's kind of weird for an arcade game, though, because like your action only takes place in a

quarter of the screen. Yeah, it's a very little thing. Like the entire. top half of the screen is the map and then player one gets the left side of the bottom half and player two gets the right side of the bottom half if you play solo you don't get the whole screen you get like a player two space covered by a thing that

says player two insert coin to start so it's kind of not helpful so it feels sort of cramped and it's like you know one of those older PC games where they would window the action you know because they didn't have the processing power technical reasons yeah and it's happened by a

necessity that it's not that graphically impressive because you're only using like a quarter of your pixels to show all the action. But in this case, processing power wasn't the issue. It was just like the design of the game. The interface design necessitated that quarter view. So it's the usual problem. It's a strange choice. Splitting up a monitor into smaller monitors. You know, there's only so much you can do. You're going to lose real estate somewhere. And so at least it goes to good use with the map there. So you can get, you know, you get this whole overview and you can sort of strategically plan things because it shows on the map where the bombs have to go. And each player can go in wildly different directions. It's probably helpful to see that map and see where each other. Yeah, absolutely. I feel like this is one that would work better as a head-to-head cabinet system

as opposed to a shared screen. I would have liked to see like gauntlet something like this, where you can go wherever you want and you don't have to wait until somebody goes off the edge and you can't go any further or something. I don't know. But yeah, two different screens would be better.

But hey. Yeah, the pacing and something about it just reminds me of some of those Lucasar's games from the mid-90s like zombies ate my neighbors and Herc's Adventures I don't love that game What?

That's okay You don't love that game? There's something about it's so People say it's so great Because a lot of zombies ate my neighbors And I don't know what I just can't get into it Man

I haven't played Hertz Herx Adventures is great Cyclopses are cool Cyclops Cyclops Cyclopsian Cyclops Cyclops

There's a lot to like about Hertz Adventure, but that's it's definitely the same sort of top-down maze kind of deal where you're going around. But yeah, it's very much like of a sort of not strategic exactly game, but sort of mission-based, and it's very much about navigating a space and performing objectives.

Figuring out how to get around the enemies. To crackdown on the enemies. Exactly. It has nothing to do with the amazing 2007 crackdown from who designed that? Rufian. Roofie and soft. I don't know. Microsoft publish it.

I don't know. It was former DMA, Dave Jones. Great game. But nothing at all like this. Yeah. All right. Next on the list is Wonderboy 3. Which Wonder Boy 3?

The other Wonder Boy 3. We talked about this on the Wonder Boy episode. Yeah, it's one of the two Wonder Boy 3s, not the Dragon's trap. That was a great game. This is a good game, but it's nothing at all like the others. It's a side-scrolling shooter. Yeah. There's no other Wonder Boy like that.

I thought this was really interesting because it really shows you the, like, through line of this very weird series. So, like, if you haven't played all these, you hear someone say that, like, you know, original Wonder Boy, which became Adventure Island. So Adventure Island is just this, you know, run and jump thing. And then you have on the other end, you have Monster World, which is like this huge sprawling adventure game RPG thing. And you're like, how do these things go together? And this really seems like the midpoint to me. like in that in that well in that you've i would say this is the opposite of the midpoint this well this goes so far from though it is sort of a tangent it's but but just like watching this play

it's like you've got this like constant motion forward motion thing from that you associate with adventure island but then you've also got these like kind of fantasy characters you've got this sword guy and the and the magic girl um so i don't know maybe it's just an aesthetic midpoint it's not really gameplay i can see that but but you've got yeah you got this fantasy aesthetic going on with a sword guy and a wizard girl, and yet it's a shooter, which is weird. But I don't know where I'm going on this.

It's developed by Westone. Yep. Yeah, all the Wonder Boy games were, actually. That was their baby. It's this weird series that kind of dips into every genre. Yeah, we had a full episode last year with Ray Barnhold and really delved into all the shenanigans around the naming of the games, and it's relation to Adventure Island,

and it's way too complicated to go into again, so just go listen to that episode. But yeah, this is the one that people don't really know that well because it was arcade only. I don't think it came to it didn't come to Genesis. It might have made it to PC engine. But it's kind of the forgotten

Wonder Boy three. The other one, the dragon's trap, is the one that was remade earlier this year. Yeah, that's great. But yeah, it's a shooter that looks like it wants to be an adventure game. And so that's where kind of the other fork went from there. Yeah. All right. Super Monaco, GP. Do we do we care about it? I have a hard time

getting into old racing games. Yeah, it's a formula. It's a Formula One super. Basically, this was the Super Scalar, I think, for like Formula One nerds. Um, is what it look like. It's basically just the one track. I can't get my head around it. I'm just like, driving in a circle. It's the one car and the one track. And it's like going for more realism.

It seems like it's got these like the splash screens are all digitized photos. And it seems like this was just, if you like Super Scalar games and you really like Formula One, this is your game. Otherwise, we have to be European to get it. I think so. I think So, like, Formula One just doesn't resonate with Americans, like us. Yeah.

So, we're all crazy bootleggers for the NASCAR and everything. We like that. Yeah, exactly. Indie racing, which is like, it's like, it's like Formula One, but wrong. Yeah. But the one cool thing this did is it had a rear-free mirror. So it had like this little inset, also super scalar going away from you in the back. So you could see.

That was just them showing off. It was. It was. But that was, that was like the innovation on top of just being the Formula One. And, uh, Mario Kart. that off, didn't it? You could do like a reverse view in Mario Kart. You could like flip it? Yeah. Yeah, because Mario Kart had half the screen always devoted to

something else. Yeah, the bottom app or player too. So you could use that for like the reverse view, I think so. On one of them or something. Yeah, which one did that? Is it the original? I think so, yeah. Okay. Oh, it's all blend together in my brain. Yeah. Yeah. All right. But then Shadowdanceor, I can get into that. Side scrolling, action games with Ninja? Okay. But it had a puppy dog. And a dog. That was the cool thing.

A dog who's your best friend and also kills bad guys. We didn't actually kill them. Did he, like, drug them out from the high cover? He, like, rips them apart. I thought he, like, grabs them and then you have to shoot them. No, he can, like, take them out. Okay. Yeah.

Remove them from action. All right. Cool. That's what dogs should do is be your best friend in the video game. Rip up big shadow. Yep, rip and tear. So, yeah, this is, Shadow Dancer is a sequel to Sinobi. Shinobi, sorry.

Sinobi sounds cool. Sinobi. It depends on how you romance. it, sure. Shinobi very much the same vein. It's more refined. Modern Ninja action. Yep. It takes place in a variety of

interesting levels. It starts out in an airport, and I feel like this airport stage has been widely imitated by similar games. There's an airport stage in Ninja 5-0, which is such a Shinobi rip-off. It's ammash. Okay, sure. Elevator action

too also has an entire stage set in an airport, where you even go through the cross-section of an airplane, rescuing hostages. Well, no, rescuing hostages is Ninja 50. And this one, you're just like, oh, I think you can, like, throw a grenade and it, like, blows up all the seats or something. I don't know. It's great.

But, like, the idea, they did it first here, the fight through the airport and then the cutaway view of the plane where the boss is. Good stuff. This one, you're actually, like, disabling bombs, aren't you, as you go through the levels? Yes. Yeah. So, were there any Shinobi games where you were rest? rescuing hostages.

Yeah. Wasn't the first one? There are people tied up and you got to... You just have to walk by them, yeah. Yeah, they all kind of blend together. But that was kind of like the... A recurring theme in a lot of these games. Ninja 50 also has that.

And code name Viper has that. All these games with like the multi-tiered high-jumping walk and shoot action. Yeah. This doesn't say... Like Thunder? Does that have hostages? It does not. But you jump high.

Well, Layla, is... the hostage that you have to rescue. She gets disrobed by the bad guys because she's a woman in a video game. Yikes. This also had the same thing. I guess Shinobi did this too where you can sometimes like jump behind the fence or whatever and be on another plane. Right. And you also

like jump up and then it has the first person perspective bonus stages. Which in this case it's not just like a shooting gallery. It's like you're looking up a skyscraper. Yeah. I saw that. And they're a ninja like coming off of different levels of the skyscraper.

and jumping down at you. So you're tossing, you're tossing shirkin up at them and trying to take them out as they descend. Of course, then you could have just stepped out of the way and watch them go splat. You'd think, wouldn't you? But I guess it's just too much trouble to move out of the way. So yeah, there's like lots of cool stages, themes, very modern junkyards, and you go into the support structure of a bridge, fight through caves and docks, and then the final battle takes place on a space shuttle gantry. Which is, I don't know why a ninja enemy wants to stop the space shuttle,

but you have to go save the space shuttle and you defeat the final boss on the gantry right by the shuttle, and then you step back and the shuttle launches. And somehow, somehow the Shadow Dancer is not burned to occur. It's amazing. Having the shuttle in your game is always cool. Well, it was 1989. Yeah. It was prime space shuttle territory after the, you know, the relaunch of the space shuttle.

Yep. The relaunch? Yeah, after a challenge. Right, right, no, I know, but like a literal relaunch. Yeah, the relaunch, yeah. Is that where the term came from? Yeah. Like, we're relaunching the shuttle.

Oh, let's use that for our video game franchises. Yeah. They used to literally shoot games out of cannons when they were released. Oh, yeah, like baseball games. Right. Like, ah, I want a t-shirt. Ow. Isn't that how Flanders' wife died?

Yeah. Video game to the head. So let's move along to 1990. Do you think we have time to tackle 1990? I mean, if we only got you in here, we could probably do this. All right. So Alien Storm, talk about it to someone. It's another beat-em-up, but then it also has, like,

Shinobi, like, first-person levels in it, too. I always get this one mixed up with Alien Syndrome and Alien Soldier. Yeah. So I never played this one back in the day. going back to that well. It's kind of weird looking. I don't know. I thought we were talking about alien soldiers,

so I don't even know what this one is. So you've got these like short range energy weapon attacks and there's these very grotesque aliens and they like to like hide in everyday objects. Like you'll be passing this tree and suddenly, oh no, it's an alien. And yeah, you can like call in an airstrike as a special attack and. Oh, no, it's an alien. And then there's these. And then there's in between. Yeah.

Just wandering the house. And then there's these first-person shooting gallery stages, kind of like Shinobi. Only, it's more extensive. Like, there's a whole bunch of, like, enemies that come out at you during the stage. Is this a side-scrolling beat-em-up? Yeah, mostly it's the size-pointed-up, but then in between the levels, it has these first-person stages. Yeah, to me, it's much less interesting than Alien Syndrome and Alien Soldier. Yeah, I love Alien Syndrome.

I didn't really catch my eye that much. We've talked about that. But someone mentioned it in the letters, so someone liked it. Okay. I mean, it's interesting looking. Like, it's definitely interesting. It's got this weird kind of. I don't know, not quite Geiger-esque, but almost.

Like, it doesn't look like alien, but it looks very grotesque. Yeah, I remember this game. I've played this game. There's people shooting, they've got laser beam packs or something. You've got these little short-range laser things that you're hitting the aliens with. Yeah. Forgetable. Unless you loved it. That's fine.

Okay. So, yeah, forgettable. Less forgettable is columns. Columns. I've never gotten my head around the way this game works. So, like, I can't, I can't play this game effectively. I mean, it's kind of... But it kind of shows up everywhere.

Yeah, I mean, it's basically... Well, like, so, like, Dr. Mario, right, where you've got the two-color... Bob's only, you have three-color stacks instead. Right, and that's what makes it challenging. Yeah. And there's so many more pieces to work with. Yeah. It's like, Dr. Mario needs more complexity, and I think columns needs a little less.

It's like bejewled without the... Yeah, except the jude is you've got the full... You've got the full... There are gems. Yeah. But it's more like Tetris, Dr. Mario. Columns. Oh, good.

I looked it up. Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. No, no. So this was, I mean, this was the Tetris clone that wasn't Tetris before we had a million of them. Yeah, and it's just you've got three color. But you've got three color blocks and you drop them and you try to match them up and then you can cause cascades and that sort of thing. Yeah, that's the part that gets me is like creating the cascades. Yeah.

I can line up, you know, three colors. That's no problem. Back in the day. making combos. Yeah. Like, I feel like Sega would do this better

and compile would do this better with Puyo Puyo. Yeah, but Puyo Puyo was way more my thing back in the day. I spent, I spent a lot more time

on Puyo Puyo Puyo than I ever did. Note that there's a Puyo Puyo Teteris and not a Colum's Tetris, even though Columns is the more iconically it is not a superior game franchise. Yeah, I think it would be Puyo Puyo Puyo but it's not Puyo Puyo Tettress.

Yeah, no gameplay-wise Puyo Puyo was more successful. Colum's is neat, but I got the, you know, the impression that they were trying to rip off Tetris at the time, like everyone else with the block falling games, they said, we need our Tetris. I mean, it became a packing game for Game Gear, right? Yeah, I mean, it started on like Atari ST or something, an American?

Yeah, no, not an American, maybe he's like Dutch or Swedish or something. Jay Girston created it and released it on Atari ST, NEC, PCE, a whole bunch of the home computer stuff. And then he basically just sold the whole thing to Sega. so it ended up in like it showed up on all the Sega platforms it was on Game Gear and Master System and Genesis

and it keeps getting reissued and like it it seems to have been a mainstay for Sega so I guess it did well I like the Egyptian theme I like the music the music great but I just I never quite grasped how the combos

and everything work in this game so I could never you know do high level play the way that I couldn't touch this Yeah, now I was Maybe it's a failing in Mela. All right. Next up is Bonanza Brothers. And this one, I did not know what to think of it,

but I kind of would describe it after playing it as like a two-player keystone capers. Yeah. So it's another cartoony one, but it's got this weird sort of like pre-rendered plastic 3D look to it. So it's like you're playing with little toys. Um, but it's a, yeah, so it's a side view sort of 2D layout thing, um, except like Keystone are kind of like an elevator action sort of layout. Um, but you're trying to, trying to infiltrate these buildings and grab the treasures, uh, without getting nabbed by all

the security guards. And you can do things like open doors into them to take them out or, or hit them from behind. Yeah, there's like a little bit of mapy and a little bit of metal gear in it. Wasn't there a looping game that worked on this premise too, I think? But maybe. I mean, it was certainly fit the premise. Yeah, like, it's a very strange game for Sega, because this is another one that, like, Dynamite Ducks, really looks European in style. There's a very European look to it, but it's not. It's, you know, Sega's Japan Studios.

It just has that kind of vibe to it. And it has a very sort of slow-paced, stealth-oriented design, which is unusual for arcades. Like, I can see this as a Genesis game, but knowing that it came from arcades, I just kind of scratch my head, and I'm like, really? And it's got, it's also got the same kind of split screen going on that, um, when we were just talking about, uh, yeah, crackdown. Crackdown.

Same sort of thing going on at crackdown. So you can have your two characters, um, going at once with, with a shared map. But it's, yeah, it's all top and half and all bottom half. Yeah. Yeah. It's not a, it's not quartered up like the other one. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. So, but so I'm presumably you can do that. And I've, you know, I've never gotten a chance to actually play. play this with two players, but I'm guessing you can do things like bait guards to go after one guy and then get him in the back with the other guy. I've played this co-op on the Genesis before. Okay, cool. Yeah. Me and my friends used to, years and years ago, when the emulators first supported online play, I would just pick out all the co-op Genesis games, and we would try to play them online, and this is one of them. It was pretty fun. I don't remember much about it other than

it was just neat and weird and quirky and, you know. Yeah, it's definitely different from anything else we've looked at on it. Actually, you know, I think if you look at the, uh, the Sega 86, 87 games we talked about last time. And look at those as sort of like the technological revolution era for Sega. This is more about the co-op design. Like that was very much a trend of the time as you started to get things like double dragon and final fight and really just like cooperative play. And it feels like with these games, they're taking the concept of co-op play and saying, where else can we take this beyond just like walking and punching stuff? I mean, you've got your golden axe, your alien storm, your dynamite ducks. But then you have,

really kind of quirky, innovative games like this and, like, crackdown. There's an Atari game that's split up and down. Xenophobe? Yeah, xenophobia. And also, there was an earlier game on Atari 800 and Commodore 64 called Spy versus Spy. Yeah. That had each player could be in their own room. You buried the lead on that one.

It's based on Mad Magazine's spy versus spy characters. Yeah, but everybody knows that, right? I don't know. I mean, it's a great game. But I'm just saying it was the similar mechanically in terms of, of as a precursor in terms of splitting the screen and having two people play at the same time in two different rooms and whatever.

Yeah, so it was an idea that had been around and they were experimenting. Whereas I feel like Bonanza Brothers is more cooperative than Spy versus Spy, so it's, you know, black and white hate each other. And even Xenophobe was more, there was kind of like an element of like screwing each other over. Whereas I feel like Bonanza Brothers is not so much about that. That's pretty pure co-op. Yeah, right.

But it is interesting to see Sega, like, come up with weird ideas that, you know, take a common prevailing trend in video games and say, how can we spend this in our own direction? That's great. I also saw one thing say the protagonists in this were based on the Blues Brothers. I don't know if that's citation needed. I mean, it's a tall guy and a short guy in dark glasses. Could be Bert and Ernie. Stealing stuff. But yeah. I don't know what I'm going to be. I don't know. I'm going to be able to be.

So winding down. G-lock, I feel like I've played this game, but now that I'm, I didn't have a chance to look it up, and now I'm like, what the hell is this game? I looked it up, and I don't think I have ever played it. It's, you know, it's another air combat in the vein of Afterburner. Oh, you know what? I've played it on Game Gear, which is not really... The ideal fight.

Yeah. Probably not. Yeah, so this is very much dogfighting. You're just, you're flying around trying to shoot down enough planes to clear the level. You can... It has a few cool gimmicks. Like, if you get shot but don't die, you can crack your windshield. And it actually, like, cracks a lot and kind of makes it hard to see things,

which would probably be really frustrating in practice actually playing it. But it's kind of an interesting idea, anyways. Glock, this is something I didn't know. Glock stands for G-force-induced loss of consciousness. Yeah. I didn't know that from, you know, excessive G-forces while. Blood pooling in your brain. Yeah, that's what the brain.

Pooling somewhere, yeah. This was another one that got put into those R-3-6. 60 cabs, so you could have it where you could actually physically spin while you were doing all these dogfighting. Oh, wow. But it's got a much more, like, subdued visual style to most of the super scalar stuff. Like, it was going for realistic dogfighting. So it's really just open skies and ocean.

The Super Monaco GP to Afterburners Outrun. That thing. That's what I saw. The 360. I feel like the ring part of that would, is in danger of breaking away and just like rolling down the street cutting somebody's arm off if they stand too close or something. Yeah, I'm pretty sure they would have like

cordoned off, yeah. Cordened off around those cats. It did have, well, the one I saw had like one of those movie theater velvet ropes you know, with brass. They would definitely do that. I mean, velvet ropes, that's the only way to properly... This game console costs $50,000, thank you.

Yeah. So the other thing that struck me looking at this game that sort of sets apart from the other super scalar stuff is like your plane of some of the other planes really almost look like they're 3D rendered rather than being made out of sprites. I don't think that could be the case because this is still on a system Yboard. So I assume it was just like

I mean, they might have pre-rendered stuff. Yeah, and then use some very thoughtful applications of the super scalar technology to make it look convincing. Like I think they must have had, they must have had much bigger sprites of these things so you don't get the blown up pixelated look just for the planes.

Yeah, there's sprites. I was reading about the Y board and you could have sprites that were like I don't know how many pixels really really huge pixels like sprites not just eight by eight I think they have like pre-rendered some models

and they made huge sprites out of it so it gives it kind of a different look from the other other super scalar stuff but all right well the game gear version is not that impressive but I'm sure the arcade version is much more impressive I should have looked that out

never actually seen it in an arcade though so and then finally what better game to end on for this third look at Sega than Michael Jackson's Moonwalker. Michael Jackson and Sega were like peas and carrots back in the day. There was just this in, in, indubitable, undeniable. I thought you're going to say, indenubidoo.

Indibundi did that. I'm kind of a Latin word. Yes. There was just this, this very undeniable connection between the two, an association. Why? Because Michael Jackson really liked a video game. Their games were cool, yeah. And I, you know, I think, yeah, he liked their games specifically.

And I think they were like, wow, Michael Jackson wants to be associated with us. Hell yes. Yeah, I'm pretty sure he had the afterburner. This was King of Pop. He probably had the 50,000. Yeah, I mean, this was King of Pop era. Oh, I'm sure he had like all the deluxe Sega motion cabinets in the Neverland range. In Neverland, yeah.

Well, 1990 was peak Michael Jackson. Yep. It was. Yeah, and I remember right after bad and smooth criminal. Thinking this game was so cool. I go and look at it now and it's really it's not that impressive looking I mean it's another it's another co-op game

it looks fine you can play as two Michael Jackson's I think you could be three Michael Jacks yeah three they're all just like just like gold max it's like it's the original smooth criminal outfit and then a black version of the smooth criminal outfit and a red version of the smooth criminal outfit and you can have them all on screen it once I remember people loving this for the Genesis

and I didn't understand why I'm sure I've played it briefly but I just didn't get into it I mean it's got all kinds of great FM synthesis versions of Michael Jackson's music. Like his most recognizable songs, you hear them, and it's, you know, brim-bib-a-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-l-b-l-b-l-b-b-l-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-h. Yeah, it's got that kind of, like, twangy, metallic sound to it, but you're like, Michael Jackson is in my video games.

Yeah, and he, like, did, like, these, like, energy attacks with his hat and stuff, and then you could, like, and you found a little. So it was, of course, loosely based on the Moonwalker movie, which I never actually saw. But it had, but it had, but it had, but it's like 30 minutes long, isn't it? Yeah. Or am I thinking of Captain Neo? I saw Captain Neo at Disneyland, but, but that was. It's just, uh, sort of like a bunch of music videos, um, linked together into an hour-long movie or something.

But there's also a chimpanzee. Yeah. Was it bubbles? John Lennon has a cameo in it. John Lennon. Yeah, John Lennon is a son. Sean, I didn't ever. Not Julian?

So in the game. Is it Sean or Julian? Sean. Well, he has two sons. Yeah. Julian was like a pop star in the 80s and then Sean came along later and was kind of an indie rocker. Yeah, he still is.

He's cool. Is he? Yeah, I talked to him on Twitter sometimes. Oh, yeah. How about that? We're buddies. We're Twitter buddies. He was like, he kind of made a splash when he was dating someone from, I want to say

Shibomato. Yeah. Yeah. And she like, Yuga, Yuga Honda. Yeah. And she like, she helped him. Yeah, he helped him. I create that solo album and it was amazing.

And then he kind of. off the face of the earth. I met him. He came to Chapel Hill in 1998 with Chibo Motto and my friend, my brother's friend said, hey, Sean Lynn's going to be in town. Right before I moved here. Yeah, he was sitting in Caribu Coffee on Franklin Street. And I went in and just said hi and he, you know, chatted with him for a while and got his autograph on the album. It was cool. Cool. Cool. Anyway, he's a cool. Is he really half horse, half musician? He is. That's amazing. How did he get into the EP? Yeah. Yeah. I didn't know you're Sean Lennon fan. This is great. I dated a girl who really liked him.

And I was like, oh, this is great music. Yeah. Normally, you know, you date someone and you're like, oh, you like you're on music, that's fine. But, no, this stuff's great. This is all, like, totally beside the point, though. So I don't know how it worked in the movie. I don't know how it works in the movie. But in the game, if you find the chimpanzee, if you find bubbles, like, he's a power-up

and you turn into super-Michael. You become, like, robotic Michael, and you can shoot lasers at everything. And it was, yeah. And then the super attack is, like, you dance. And, like, you compel all the enemies to dance. with you and then. Yes, I remember that. And the spotlights come down. It's like the thrill video. You dance and all they all dance behind you. And then like, I guess because they can't keep up with Michael's dance moves, they're all destroyed. It's really, it's just another screen

clearing attack. But it's like the coolest screen clearing attack. Yeah, I don't know. I look at it now and I feel like I would be really bored by it. But, but it was just so cool. At the time. Yeah. Michael Jackson was really cool. Yeah. And we've talked about Michael Jackson's association with Sega in other contexts before. I don't know that we've really. talked about Moonwalker before on Retronauts. I mean, he did some music for Space Channel 5. Yeah. Well, I mean, he was in Space Channel 5. Yeah, there's Space Michael. He didn't do any music for the first one, but he did contribute more to the second one. Yeah. Space Michael was part of the plot. Yeah, I recently interviewed Tetsuya Musiguchi,

who designed and directed Space Channel 5. So you can check out that episode, and he talks about his association with Michael Jackson. And of course, there's the whole mystery of did he or didn't he with Sonic the Hedgehog 3's soundtrack. So, yeah, it's all part of the Michael Jackson's Sega continuity continuum. He definitely did the music that's in Moonwalkers, so we can say that was certain. Yes, 100% certain. But, yeah, it's a game that doesn't necessarily hold up that well, but it's such a perfect relic of that era. Yeah, it is very 1990.

It is the essence of 1990. It is a Sega arcade game featuring Michael Jackson, and it's a co-op brawler. Isometric. Wow. What else do you want? Yep. Crazy. That was 1990. Sign of the Times. All right. So we actually made it through three whole years this time. That's amazing. Well done us.

How long is this episode? Let's just do 1991 while we are. No, I didn't make any notes. Stop. Well, we'll catch Sega's 90s output next time we do one of these. But I did want to, yeah, continue the journey into Sega's arcade history because it's so good. And once we're done with Sega, then there's lots of other countries. companies who's arcade output we can look at and other countries why the hell not other stuff freak video games maybe someday jeremy will let me babble about hypercard a lot all right we'll do it in the meantime though we're going to wrap this episode so thanks everyone for listening thank you

for those who wrote in your letters were great and taught us many things so thank you for that as always i'm jeremy parrish you can find me on twitter as games bite. And of course, I'm always doing stuff for retronauts, video, text, podcasts, books, posters. I don't know what else. True multimedia blitz. Yeah, I can't help it. He's on the radio. He's on the TV. Can we get Jeremy Parrish plushies yet? No, never. But yes, of course, you can support retronauts by downloading us and listening to us and maybe supporting our sponsors if you want. That's cool. If you don't, I understand.

But you can also support us directly through Patreon for $3 a month. You get these episodes a week early and at higher audio quality and without ads. So that's pretty cool. It's a good deal. I think so. But I'm the one who's selling it. So what do I know? And of course, yes, you can check out Retronauts.com where you'll find all of this stuff.

Benj. I'm Benj Edwards. You can find me at Vintagecom and also on Twitter at Benjed Edwards. and I'm also on Patreon, patreon.com slash Ben Edwards. And? I'm Ben Elgin. I'm on Twitter at Kieran, which is K-I-R-I-N-N.

And I also have a blog where I put random retro stuff on on Tumblr at Kieran'sretrocloset.tumbler.com. And there's only one N in Kieran there, just to be difficult. There's a 3-N version somewhere, isn't there? Probably some service where both ends were taken. You don't have to worry about this. And I guess that wraps it up. So thanks again, everyone, for listening. We'll be back soon, like in a week with another episode.

And somewhere along there with a micro episode on a Friday. So watch out for that one. We want We want Fretelgrass. We want Fretelgrass. Pretzel crust fans rejoice because it's backed by popular demand, Little Caesars Large, soft pretzel crust featuring a creamy cheddar cheese sauce, pepperoni, and a four cheese blend surrounded by a delicious salted soft pretzel crust for just $6. Hot and ready every day between four and eight and only six bucks from the home of pretzel crust pizza, Little Caesars.

Pizza, pizza, pizza at participating locations plus tax. The Mueller Report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine, Susan Collins, says she would vote for a congressional resolution

disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners. his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officer started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do.

The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.